The Secret to Crowdsourced Innovation Management

What we now think of as closed innovation dates back to the early twentieth century when a great deal of R&D was dedicated to the commercial application of scientific discoveries. This allowed corporations to control their IP and offered those companies a perceived competitive edge. This work was conducted in secrecy by an elite group of individuals, scientists or research employees and for a long time this system worked.

But what we conceive of as the old standard for intellectual property is changing, in a recent article in Wired, one author even writes “In many cases, it’s even a limiting factor for industry development, and oddly enough, infringes on the rights of authors.” And because the pace of change has accelerated rapidly, many companies and groups are now opening the process and looking to the crowd in order to identify new ideas that will serve their organization.

Chesbrough outlines many benefits to opening up the innovation process, including (but not limited to) how it reduces overall research and development costs, brings solutions to market faster and raises the potential for viral marketing while reducing overall market risk. But in order to successfully involve the crowd in the innovation management framework, it asks R&D teams to develop a skill that wasn’t always embedded in their groups before: communications.

Crowd innovation programs have to think about their engagement strategies and the best way to do that is to start thinking like a multichannel marketer. A great example of this is the City of Minneapolis, which launched a multichannel campaign to their community asking for ideas on how to help their city meet their mission. But instead of just sending out an email blast to their citizens, the city promoted this crowdsourcing initiative through multiple channels (both online and offline).

If you’re going to start involving the crowd, then you need to start by creating your multichannel strategy. Here’s a list of the most common marketing channels to get you started, but don’t stop there. Be creative. How else can you get the word out?

• Email
• Direct Mail
• Social Media
• Event Marketing
• Website
• Display ads
• Mobile Marketing
• And the list goes on…

To learn more about the City of Minneapolis and their IdeaScale implementation, download the case study here.

The Secret to Crowdsourced Innovation Management